Woman who battled skin cancer three times issues stark warning over 'tanmaxxing' trend
A woman is urging people to 'learn from my dumb mistakes' after she got skin cancer three times after getting 'roasted' during lengthy sunbathing periods while she was younger.
54-year-old Liz Benditt said she'd had skin cancer taken out of her leg twice and her nose once, and is now hitting out at the TikTok trend of 'tanmaxxing'.
You can most likely guess what this trend entails, but for the uninitiated it involves planning the day around UV levels, avoiding strong suncream and making the most of tanning oils and butters to get as much suntan as possible.
People working on their tan has existed long before TikTok but Liz is worried that it's a trend that'll lead to bad things in the years to come, and she is speaking from experience.
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"I tanmaxxed in the 80s, and I want people to learn from my dumb mistakes," said the Missouri woman.
"I can't believe this tanmaxxing trend. It's shocking. If my story doesn't scare them, they deserve what they get.
"Don't tan max. It's not worth it."
She said when she was growing up she was 'very fair skinned' and had 'red hair and freckles' so she thought she'd never get a tan, but tried hard to do so as a teenager.
She said: "I used Hawaiian Tropic 5. It smelled delicious – just like summer – and me and my girlfriends would roll out our towels and just lie in the sun."
"I would just get roasted. I can't tell you how many sunburns I had. I was destroying my skin."
When she was 16 a doctor told her to switch to sunbeds to avoid burning her skin, but when she was 37 her mum spotted a mole on her leg and urged her to see a dermatologist.
The mole was removed and sent off for a biopsy and the next day Liz was told she had melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer.
"I was devastated. The doctor said this was not something to mess with and I had to get straight into surgery," she explained.
"I also had to have a lymph node biopsy in my groin to see if the cancer had spread. I was awake and it was this huge needle at the top of my thigh.
"I remember screaming. It was excruciating."
She also had a 'great ball of blood on my inner thigh that had to be lanced off', which has caused her 'significant scarring and trauma' she still feels today.
Fortunately for Liz the cancer was caught before it spread to her lymph nodes, and now she sees a dermatologist four times a year and makes sure she keeps her skin covered.
It didn't fully stop the cancer, in 2015 she found an unusual growth on her nose and was diagnosed with basal cell skin cancer, which was cut away while she 'was awake the whole time'.
She later got skin cancer on her leg again, and has had breast cancer twice as well as thyroid cancer.
Doctors are unable to confirm whether the other three times she got cancer are linked to her skin cancer, and Liz says that she 'got so lucky' with her treatment because she 'could have been dead by now.
"My kids could have been without a mother age one and three," she said.
Now she's urging others not to repeat the same errors of youth which could in the decades to come lead to their own cancer diagnosis.
Joe Harker